Scott Huddleston: Still burned, but back at the wheel

I thought Facebook was the dumbest thing when I first was invited by a friend to join about a year ago.

But it’s kept me in touch with good friends, and great people, including some who serve in the military.

One of the most rewarding, and excruciating, experiences I’ve had as a journalist was spending several weeks with Army Staff Sgt. Christopher Edwards, who had burns to nearly 80 percent of his body from a bomb blast in Iraq in April 2005. My Dec. 24, 2006 article and corresponding online video by multimedia producer Angela Grant told not only Chris’s story, but it also chronicled the hardships that his injury put on his wife Tammy and young son Riley.

At the time, Chris’s latest milestone in his recovery was picking up and eating a potato chip — a mundane task for most people, but a major feat for someone with little use of his hands, due to burns that nearly took his life.

I remember when I first interviewed Chris, at the request of an editor who thought he’d be a good person to profile. I wasn’t so sure. His sarcastic, dark humor made me wonder. At one point, I had him telling me about the many times he could have died — first from the initial blast, and then from infections.

“And then there was my wife’s lasagna last night,” he deadpanned.

Over time, I realized that Chris, like so many of our wounded, use those kinds of acidic one-liners to get through the day. He has been part of a small cadre of badly burned troops at Brooke Army Medical Center who have mentored others having to cope with the physical and mental anguish of being burned.

There were a lot of heavy hearts at BAMC nearly a year ago, when the hospital’s “Miracle Man,” Marine Corps Sgt. Merlin German, died after a routine surgery, after having survived 97 percent burn coverage for three years.

But it was to my delight when I got back in touch with Tammy Edwards on Facebook recently. She said Chris, now 37, was starting to drive again. What a huge milestone for a man who’s been through so much.

I told Belinda Blancarte, a former Express-News reporter now working for the New Jersey-based Burn Advocates Network. While she recently was in town for a burn convention in San Antonio, she wrote an online article about Chris’s latest triumph. It’s featured on a page dedicated to “Burn Surivors who Inspire.”

I’ve known disabled vets and civilians with even less mobility than Chris who’ve learned to drive, with the help of adaptive equipment. But it seems such a fitting tribute for him to be behind the wheel again. Among the hundreds of thousands of commuters in San Antonio, there are few who have sacrificed so much for the freedom we have to go wherever we choose.